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Gas Town Decoded

alilleybrinker.com

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Re: Gas Town Decoded

#231

Post by ares623 »

troupo wrote: post #230
soulofmischief wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apply your own "functional literacy". I made a clarification that those outside of an industry have to separate the opinions of professionals and hype artists. The irony of your comment would be salient, if it didn't feel like I was speaking with a child. This conversation is over, there's no reason to continue speaking with you as long you maintain this obnoxious attitude coupled with bad reading comprehension.

It's a hillarious attempt to save face. "Separate opinions of professionals" etc. Here's Ryan Dahl, cofounder of Deno, creator of Node.js tweeting today: --- start quote --- This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syn…

They have everything to gain by saying those things. It doesn’t even need to be true. All the benefits arrive at the point of tweeting.

If it turns out to be not true then they don’t lose anything.

So we are in a state where people can just say things all the time. Worse, they _have_ to say. To them, Not saying anything is just as bad as being directly against the hype. Zero accountability.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#232

Post by throw310822 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #138
lordnacho wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You no longer have to be very specific about syntax. There's now an AI that can translate your idea into whatever language you want. Previously, if you had an idea of what the program needed to do, you needed to learn a new language. This is so hard that we use language itself as a metaphor: It's hard to learn a new language, only a few people can translate from French to English, for example. Likewise, few people ca…

The hard part of software development is equivalent to the hard part of engineering: Anyone can draw a sketch of what a house should look like. But designing a house that is safe, conforms to building regulations, and which wouldn't be uncomfortable to live in (for example, poor choice of heat insulation for the local climate) is the stuff people train on. Not the sketching part. It's the same for software developmen…

> Anyone can draw a sketch of what a house should look like. But designing a house that is safe, conforms to building regulations, and which wouldn't be uncomfortable to live in...

And now we have AIs that can take your sketch on paper and add all these complex and technical things by themselves. That's the point.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#233

Post by theshrike79 »

ben_w wrote: post #130
dchuk wrote: post #98

I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term. That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impress…

Mm. I'd agree, the code "isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impressive". However, I've seen some totally successful, even award-winning, human-written projects where I could say the same. Ages back, I heard a woodworking analogy: LLM code is like MDF. Really useful for cheap furniture, massively cheaper than solid wood, but it would be a mistake to use it as a structural element in a house. Now, I've n…

"Without oversight" is the key here.

You need to define the problem space so that the agent knows what to do. Basically give it the tools to determine when it's "done" as defined by you.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#234

Post by spmurrayzzz »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #227
spmurrayzzz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has also been an interesting social experiment in that we get to see what work people think is actually impressive vs trivial. Folks who have spent years effectively snapping together other people’s APIs like LEGOs (and being well-compensated for it) are understandably blown away by the current state of AI. Compare that to someone writing embedded firmware for device microcontrollers, who would understandably be…

I think this says a lot about yourself and where your prejudices and preferences lie.

Preferences I think I get, but prejudices?

The OED defines prejudice as a "preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience."

My day to day work involves: full stack web dev, distributed systems, embedded systems, and machine learning. In addition to using AI tooling for dev tasks, we also use agents in production for various workflows and we also train/finetune models (some LLMs, but also other types of neural networks for anomaly detection, fault localization, time series forecasting, etc). I am basing my original commentary in this thread on all of that cumulative experience.

It has been my observation over the last almost 30 years of being a professional SWE that full stack web dev has been much easier and simpler than the other domains I work in. And even further, I find that models are much better at that domain on average than the other domains, measured by pass@k scores on private evals representing each domain. Anecdotal experience also tends to match the evals.

This tracks with all the other information we have pertaining to benchmark saturation, the "we need harder evals" crowd has been ringing this bell for the last 8-12 months. Models are getting very good at the less complex tasks.

I don't believe it will remain that way forever, but at present its far more common to see someone one shot a full stack web app from a single prompt than something like kernel driver for a NIC. One class of devs is seeing a massive performance jump, another class is not.

I don't see how that can be perceived as prejudice, it just may be an opinion you don't agree with or an observation that doesn't match your own experience (both of which are totally valid and understandable).

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#235

Post by meowface »

troupo wrote: post #230
soulofmischief wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apply your own "functional literacy". I made a clarification that those outside of an industry have to separate the opinions of professionals and hype artists. The irony of your comment would be salient, if it didn't feel like I was speaking with a child. This conversation is over, there's no reason to continue speaking with you as long you maintain this obnoxious attitude coupled with bad reading comprehension.

It's a hillarious attempt to save face. "Separate opinions of professionals" etc. Here's Ryan Dahl, cofounder of Deno, creator of Node.js tweeting today: --- start quote --- This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syn…

What is incorrect or bad about his statement?

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#236

Post by meowface »

ares623 wrote: post #231
troupo wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hillarious attempt to save face. "Separate opinions of professionals" etc. Here's Ryan Dahl, cofounder of Deno, creator of Node.js tweeting today: --- start quote --- This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syn…

They have everything to gain by saying those things. It doesn’t even need to be true. All the benefits arrive at the point of tweeting. If it turns out to be not true then they don’t lose anything. So we are in a state where people can just say things all the time. Worse, they _have_ to say. To them, Not saying anything is just as bad as being directly against the hype. Zero accountability.

What does he have to gain? This is Deno: https://deno.com

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#237

Post by meowface »

troupo wrote: post #180
meowface wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your posts here remind me of Trumpists citing random Twitter leftists as Democratic party leaders.

Lol. "random leftists" First two come directly from OpenAI, Anthropic and others Last one is literally made rounds even on HN e.g. Klarna bringing back their support staff after they tried to replace them with AI.

Last one is irrelevant. Of course some companies are miscalculating.

OpenAI never claimed they had achieved AGI internally. Sam was very obviously joking, and despite the joke being so obvious he even clarified hours later.

>In a post to the Reddit forum r/singularity, Mr Altman wrote “AGI has been achieved internally”, referring to artificial general intelligence – AI systems that match or exceed human intelligence.

>Mr Altman then edited his original post to add: “Obviously this is just memeing, y’all have no chill, when AGI is achieved it will not be announced with a Reddit comment.”

Dario has not said "we are months away from software jobs being obsolete". He said:

>"I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code"

He's maybe off by some months, but not at all a bad prediction.

Arguing with AI skeptics reminds me of debating other very zealous ideologues. It's such a strange thing to me.

Like, just use the stuff. It's right there. It's mostly the people using the stuff vs. the people who refuse to use it because they feel it'll make them ideologically impure, or they used it once two years ago when it was way worse and haven't touched it since.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#238

Post by krupan »

colin_jack wrote: post #194
krupan wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still the same. "Hey look, I got these crappy developers (LLMs) to actually produce working code! This is a game-changer!" When the working code is a very small, limited thing.

I don't know, your talking about an incredibly talented engineer saying: "In the past week, just prompting, and inspecting the code to provide guidance from time to time, in a few hours I did the following four tasks, in hours instead of weeks" Its up to you to decide how to behave, but I can't see any reasons to completely dismiss this. It ends with good guidance what to do if you can't replicate though.

The fact that he's an extremely talented developer actually supports my overall understanding that AI producing code is way over hyped. Sure, a master of his field can get a boost out of it, after spending (unaccounted for) time learning how best to coax good code out of it. Neat?

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#239

Post by krupan »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #196
krupan wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still the same. "Hey look, I got these crappy developers (LLMs) to actually produce working code! This is a game-changer!" When the working code is a very small, limited thing.

What evidence will convince you?

Any sort of evidence! I see none! It's not really a new thing to have no evidence of productivity gains when it comes to software development tools. Some feel like vim is a huge productivity boost and some don't. Some believe rust is amazing, some hate it. It's really hard to measure these things.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#240

Post by fasbiner »

This is not a good line of reasoning since it would just as surely apply to such fanciful cult terms like "I'm using fargate with docker over ECS to integrate with ceph, but I'm considering switching to talos and EKS."

It is valuable to use unique terms of art that are not heavily overloaded and this is what gastown's terminology is intended to do, which also really helps LLMs since they are as much dumb text search as they are vector embedding.

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